This month, Mike and Roger look at two of Mike’s campaigns that have ended recently.
We mentioned:
the current edition of RuneQuest, the RuneQuest Starter Set, Lands of Glorantha: Dragon Pass, The Well of Daliath, Numenera, Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator, Org Mode, Legend In the Mist, and Godbound.
Here’s our tip jar. (Please email or leave a comment as well; they don’t always tell me when money’s gone in.)
Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.
Subtitled: I may have gotten my temples confused.
On campaign worlds with decades of published history, I greatly enjoyed the term “be-lored” which was coined here, and shall be using it henceforth.
For running games in worlds like that, I find it useful to include PC options which are sheltered or naive in some way, as a playable option for folks who aren’t conversant on a particular setting’s backgrounds. They can then receive the other PCs’ slanted data dumps in-character.
"You don’t know about Vargr/Lunars/Zhentarim? They killed my brother!’
"“What have the Lunars ever done for us? Well, there’s the mass sacrifices…”
Which is what the “barbarians just landed in Jakalla” starting point did for Tekumel. And what the “What My Father Told Me” handouts did for RQ3.
It worked this time to have the whole party come from an isolated mountain village. But I should perhaps have done what I did the last time I tried that schtick and take the things the players put into the background and use them, no matter how contradictory.
I’m currently reading LEGENDS IN THE MIST and going… Wug! The system looks flexible and story based but the number of options in chargen… is boggling my mind.
On the topic of organising notes…
For physical notes for GMing and campaign design and management, I’ve discovered in the last couple of years Japanese 26-ring B5 loose-leaf binders. I find particularly for campaign management that I am needing to go back and insert extra pages as more and more things get added to the campaign and game world. Which is quite difficult to do in a standard notebook, because you never leave enough blank pages between sections. MUJI stocks these things, and that their loose-leaf paper is very reasonably priced and works well with fountain pens.
For my electronic notes, I used to use Org-Mode, but have switched to Obsidian. While it is nowhere near as powerful as Org-Mode, it does cover 99% of the Org-Mode features I was using. The main advantages it offers me are painless syncing between devices, including phone and tablet, and a canvas tool that allows you to lay out your note files like cards on a pinboard, with visual links between them and being able to select the section of the page that is displayed. Obsidian also has the advantage of being much more… approachable for the average user than Emacs + Org-mode is.
I think I mentioned disc binding. If so I should have put it in the show notes. You have a series of T-shaped slots in the edge of the paper, and broad-rimmed discs that go into them; as with your notebooks, it’s easy to add or remove pages anywhere in the document. One can buy pre-cut paper of course, but if you’re me you haunt eBay until you can get a Staples Arc Hole Punch (no longer sold in the UK). Amazon has cheap plastic binding discs; alas I haven’t found them elsewhere.
Obsidian looks good but given how many services have been driven into the ground lately I don’t rely on anything I can’t run myself. I learned emacs for org-mode but I don’t recommend that to most people.
I’ve only encountered disc binding an online review of a rather expensive looking William Hannah brand binder. It does look like a very good binding mechanism.
I harbour similar doubts about services, which is why I avoided Obsidian for a long time. I gave it a go when I learned about third-party sync plugins, such as the Git based one.